by Ren Richards
‘How much have you told him?’ Lindsay tried again.
‘I told him I had a baby fifteen years ago and gave her up for adoption. He hasn’t pressed for more than that.’ Of course he hadn’t. Nell’s account of Reina’s birth came out during a fight. For the first year of their relationship, they’d fought all the time. Heated, screaming marathons of impassioned anger that lasted for days, until they came up gasping and desperate and, somehow, even more in love.
The fight had come about because Sebastian was frustrated by Nell’s secrecy. It wasn’t that she didn’t tell him where she’d been all afternoon or who was on the phone – he didn’t care about things like that. Rather, he always sensed that there was more to the woman he loved than what she presented. He wanted the parts of Nell that she’d just as soon leave for dead. And not only did he want to know her entire life story, he also needed to know how she felt about it. What had it been like, visiting her mother in a state pen? What was she thinking about when she couldn’t sleep? Nell had not been prepared for someone to care about these sorts of things. No one had ever asked.
It didn’t frighten her that he asked. It frightened her that she wanted to give him the truth. She wanted him to know everything about her, just like she knew everything about him and his family. His mercifully ordinary family, from which he couldn’t possibly have been given the tools to understand her own.
She wanted to tell him all about Reina, and the day she disappeared, and that it was her fault. She wanted to show him the articles and scream, ‘There. There it is. Are you happy?’
But by then she had grown too attached to the idea of loving him. And what was the point in changing her name and starting anew if she didn’t embrace the role of Nell Way, born and raised in Rochester, NY? This Nell Way had never been to Missouri. Had never heard of Greendale Park. And that awful teenage mother who lost her little girl? She was just a headline from long ago. A story heard on the news and then forgotten about as the earth churned up new tragedies and more candles were lit.
‘I had a baby,’ she’d blurted out, pulling up her shirt to show him the scar that he had seen a hundred times before. And when she broke into tears and he put his arms around her, she told herself that this had to be enough. This little lie, this bit of comfort, had to be where the truth came to an end just like a clamp on an umbilical cord. Without that clamp they would bleed to death.
‘Sebastian will leave me if he finds out,’ Nell said. She hit the steering wheel.
‘Don’t do anything rash,’ Lindsay said. ‘Easter doesn’t have contact with the outside world. The most she can do is write letters, yeah?’
Nell nodded. ‘Jasper would open a letter from Royal King’s. It could be a query. But if Sebastian saw a letter from a prison, even if it were addressed to him, maybe he would assume it was for me.’
‘You’re the one to check the mail anyway,’ Lindsay said. ‘Your address isn’t public. Letters go to your PO box.’
‘Right.’ Nell’s breathing had slowed. The overwhelming heat in her blood had settled, and things felt manageable again. There was no need to panic. Not now, anyway.
‘This day sucks,’ Lindsay said. ‘Let’s get some fucking pancakes.’
5
THEN
Two things commonly expressed about childbirth:
It hurts.
It’s worth it.
Already at age fourteen, Nell had committed these sentiments to heart and trusted that they were true. She had been to five school districts, in shitty towns and in nice towns, but they all had the same two types of girls: the ones who secretly pined over their crushes, writing their initials in their notebook and dreaming of their first kiss. And the ones who talked about finger banging at the school dance, either because they had done it or they were pretending they had.
There were some grey areas between the two, but most girls could place themselves neatly into Column A or Column B.
Nell, however, was spending her study period googling things like ‘is it true you poop when you give birth’ and ‘do stretch marks go away.’
By the ninth month, she was covered in stretch marks. Dark, angry gashes in shades of purple and deep red. She had stopped looking at herself in the mirror or in the shower. It was too dangerous to face what she had allowed to happen.
It hurts.
It’s worth it.
There were millions of women who had given birth, and you’d never know just by looking at them. Did all the traces of pregnancy go away, or was it just possible to hide them? Nell couldn’t imagine that she would ever look like a normal person again. She imagined her enormous stomach deflating once it was empty, sagging down to her knees. All those gash marks. The greasy skin. Swollen toes.
When she finally went into labour, it was actually a relief. She succumbed to the stabs of pain that shot up her spine and down her stomach. When she screamed, it was the release of all those months of worrying, of questioning her decision, of thinking she had made a mistake.
Here’s what Nell hadn’t been told: teen mothers do not give birth surrounded by chariots of angels. No one places a flower crown on your head when you’re fourteen and you stagger into the ER in the middle of the night. No one congratulates you or asks if you have a name picked out. It was a busy night for emergencies and the nurses were harried. For more than an hour, Nell twisted in a plastic chair in triage, her legs and arms going numb with shock.
When the pain rendered Nell unable to scream, it was Lindsay’s turn to make a commotion. She stormed to reception, slammed her hands on the counter and said, ‘Does anyone actually work here, or were you all just drawn inside by the pretty lights?’
Nell could hardly hear her sister over the sound of her own breathing filling her ears. She was distantly aware of her sweatpants sticking to her thighs.
‘Fuck,’ Lindsay said. Her cool fingers dug into Nell’s chin, yanking her face upward so that their eyes met. Nell had the feeling of being tethered back to earth after floating in space.
There was a nurse standing behind Lindsay now, concern in her eyes when she saw the pink lake that had spilled across the tiles between Nell’s dingy black Converse.
‘This isn’t normal, is it?’ Nell said. It came out a whisper.
‘No,’ Lindsay said, never one to lie. ‘No, and don’t you dare roll your eyes back into your head like that again.’
Had she? Nell tried to remember, but every moment leading up to this one was a blur. She searched for something – a foster home, a swing set, her mother’s face – anything. But there was only now. There was only this pain, and the sound of her sneakers splashing in something wet as she was guided into a wheelchair.
The doctors called it a cord prolapse. They never explained further, so Nell would look it up weeks later, scrolling through her phone during one of Reina’s rare naps. It meant the baby’s head had squashed down on the umbilical cord and cut off its own blood flow. With no time for an epidural and no way for Nell to push, the only option was an emergency C-section.
I don’t want to die. Nell wasn’t sure whether she’d spoken the words or merely thought them as the anaesthesia pulled her under. In the years to follow, these words would haunt her. When the caesarean scar began to scab over, when she struck the match to light the lone candle on Reina’s first birthday cake and when the missing posters went up, Nell would look back on the day she gave birth to her daughter. She would remember that when both of their lives hung in the balance, she had thought only of herself.
NOW
Nell had lived in Rockhollow for seven years now. It was known as the dragonfly city, a giant insect of electricity split at the spine by the Hudson River. From above at night, its lights stretched out in winking pink and white and blue, splayed out like an insect body with wings, its antenna flirting with Massachusetts.
From her penthouse apartment, Nell could see the western half of it. The aerial view of Rockhollow was a famous one, having been featured in a two-page spread of
Time magazine in 1984; a peaceful photo, which has been forever interred on the walls of physician waiting rooms.
She knew every crag of this city. Not just the bright and glimmering bits, but the ugly parts too. Eight million people were crammed in this small tear on the map. So many people you could drown in them. Babies and bodies appearing like offerings.
Nell had worried for a long time about being recognised here, but it never seemed to happen. Unlike Lindsay, Nell had an ordinary face. Plain, generic. Neither ugly nor pretty. She had narrow shoulders, a small nose and mouth, eyes that were blue without being bright, and dark brown hair without any hint of red or blonde even in the sunlight.
When she’d first moved to the city, she noted the work shifts at all her favourite delis and rotated her visits so she didn’t encounter the same cashiers often. She ordered different things until she’d exhausted the menu, and then she started again.
The news circuit exists in a pit of quicksand, and soon enough nobody cared about Reina. The Eddletons still tried mercilessly to keep the case afloat. November 2019 had marked nine years since the date of Reina’s disappearance, and approaching a decade had been enough of a landmark to warrant a feature on some evening news programs. Nell was pointedly absent from the family photos, thanks to the efficacy of her state attorney all those years ago.
Still, she’d kept the TV off for months, and recycled the newspapers before Sebastian could get to them.
She’d fallen in love with a man who had little interest in the world’s tragedies. On a news and cultural level, he only cared about the stock values, whether it was a buyer’s market, and occasionally what was going on in the local art scene.
Nell had learned that most people were like Sebastian. Most people turned on the news in the mornings and at night, letting the anchorperson tell grim stories while they made their coffee and unclasped their jewellery and fed their children. It was just background noise, easily forgotten and occasionally earning a ‘that’s so sad’ or ‘people are so sick’.
And now, Nell sat curled in her recliner, cradling a mug of tea and staring out at the city while the television prattled on.
Sebastian was watching a documentary about online gaming culture, something that was especially dear to his heart. This had its own world of gore and guts. No matter how realistic the graphics were, though, players could always resurrect from the dead and the monsters weren’t necessarily human. You had mythical creatures to fill that role.
‘Hey,’ Bas said. Nell blinked owlishly at him. ‘You okay?’ he asked.
She gave him a half-smile in answer. Her way of dodging the truth.
‘You never said how the interview went,’ Bas said. He lowered the volume on the TV.
She had been in the shower when he came home from work, which hadn’t been coincidence. Then she’d breezed out of the bathroom still wrapped in a towel and said, ‘Should we order in for dinner? I’m craving Thai.’ And then she had asked him about his day and made sure that there was always something to fill the silence. The TV, or the whir of the Keurig dispensing hot water for her tea.
But that could only last for so long. Of course he wanted to know how the interview went; she’d made such a big deal out of getting it.
‘I’m going to write it,’ Nell said. ‘I haven’t told Jasper yet.’ She didn’t like to pitch ideas to her agent until she’d at least done her preliminary interviews. For the Widow Thompson this had taken a month. The widow’s siblings didn’t return phone calls at first, and Nell had to start with a cousin, slowly working her way into the family’s circle of trust.
‘I’m going to reach out to Easter’s adoptive parents and see if they’re willing to speak to me,’ Nell said.
‘Her brother is working with you, right?’ Bas said.
‘Yes,’ Nell answered. ‘But he’s very close to the project and he’ll be biased. Better to get a dynamic array of participants.’
‘“A dynamic array of participants”,’ Bas said, grinning. ‘God, you sound so professional.’
She raised her chin. ‘Don’t I?’
Everything she’d said so far was the truth, but it didn’t stop the hot flutter of nerves in her stomach. A feeling like this wasn’t going to end well.
A car alarm was blaring in the street below. Maybe it had been doing that for a while. Nell grabbed the remote and raised the volume, even though it was a commercial.
Her tea had gone cold, but she blew on it like it was still hot. Suddenly the thought of Sebastian getting up to refresh her tea was unbearable. Any small act of kindness would have felt like spiders on her skin.
Tomorrow, she would contact Easter’s adoptive parents and get to work. She would pretend that everything was fine, and eventually this would be true.
The car alarm wailed on. Then came the distant sirens, the honk of a fire truck.
Sebastian got up and went over to the window. The penthouse was thirty stories up and the altitude dulled the city commotion somewhat, but he had never gotten used to the noise.
‘Hey.’ Sebastian had one hand on the velvet curtain that covered the massive floor-to-ceiling windows. ‘Where’s your sister tonight?’
‘Her monthly booze-and-painting thing at the country club,’ Nell said. The churning in her stomach kicked up a level, and her chest started to hurt. ‘How come?’
‘That looks like her car that’s on fire.’ His tone was unbelieving: nah, it couldn’t be.
Nell got up and followed his gaze.
If the coupe being devoured by flames didn’t belong to Lindsay, it was the exact same model. It was the same shade of Red Obsession, which Lindsay had so haughtily corrected when Nell made the error of just calling it ‘red’.
It’s not Lindsay’s car, she told herself. But for some undetermined reason she started running for the door, Sebastian on her heels.
Thirty stories isn’t very high when you’ve got an elevator, especially late at night when nobody else is pressing floors and adding themselves to your descent. But in certain moments it can feel like an eternity.
Nell watched the buttons for each floor light up as the car dropped lower, lower.
Thirty.
Twenty-two.
Fifteen.
When the doors finally opened, she had already imagined what she would find. But that still didn’t prepare her.
She ran through the polished, brightly lit lobby and endured another small eternity going through the revolving door to the outside, where the November cold bit at her skin. Even the heat from the burning car didn’t reach her. The smoke found her, though, fogging up her vision with black plumes, making her eyes water. Through this, she could see Lindsay’s licence plate still bolted to the bumper. That was when ‘of course it isn’t her’ collided with ‘I knew it was her’.
A crowd had formed, a mix of neighbours and passers-by, all standing across the street and at a distance, murmuring to each other and huddling.
The fire was already out. Above the ringing in her head, Nell could hear the rush of water through the hose. And then from somewhere very far away, a fireman saying, ‘We’ve got a body.’
Nell was screaming. On some level she knew this. The eyes that had been gaping at the car were now gaping at her instead. Someone held her back, and it didn’t matter that she fought or cursed or kicked. Someone was telling her to calm down, to just wait.
Smoke still wafted up like the fleeting thoughts that linger after a nightmare upon waking. And through it, Nell could see the body being pulled from the driver’s side door.
Bodies, Nell had seen. Slight and unassuming as she was, she often wove her way between reporters when bodies were found. She was one of the people who showed up to stare, wondering if there was a story in someone else’s tragedy.
But this body didn’t make sense. The skin was melting. The hair was too bright and unreal.
Nell stopped screaming. She went still, and her feet landed on the sidewalk again.
The fireman dropped the
body unceremoniously to the concrete and announced, ‘It’s a mannequin.’
Relief turned to confusion. It was a mannequin, its head turned to Nell at an inhuman angle, its eyes indifferent. Pert nose melting, cheeks charred, left ear still burning before the smoke chewed up the flames.
Sebastian was beside her now, wrapping his robe around her shoulders. He must have seen it too: the crude imposter of a corpse lying on the pavement.
All of her terror and shock turned fast into anger. She wanted to kick the thing, to crack its plastic head with the heel of her bare foot. She stomped over to her sister’s car and looked in through the shattered windows. The seats were empty.
A firefighter took her by the arm. ‘Ma’am, you need to step away.’
She drew her elbow back and hit him in the gut. It was a reflex. It had been more than a decade since anyone had tried to manhandle her but the venomous foster kid in her would always surface.
Sebastian was at her side now. ‘Go upstairs,’ he said. ‘Try and get Lindsay on her cell. I’ll talk to them.’
It was the exact right thing to say. It gave her just enough perspective to move. She ran back for the revolving door, Bas and the firefighter’s murmurings behind her.
The phone was ringing inside the apartment. Even before she’d opened the door, Nell could hear the melodic trilling, the vibration rattling the granite counter.
The name ‘Lindsay’ appeared at the bottom of the screen, below a photo of her sister wearing a Santa hat and staring through a giant fishbowl glass of wine.
‘Linds.’ Nell’s voice was breathless when she pressed the phone to her ear. She was breathing hard, as though she’d run up all thirty flights rather than taken the elevator.
‘Can you come down here?’ Lindsay said. ‘The cab just dropped me home and you’re not going to believe this; some fuckwad stole my car right out of the driveway.’
‘Okay.’ Nell fell into a barstool, all of her bones turning to jello. ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
For Nell, an estimate of ten minutes was code for ‘an hour, maybe more’. But just this once, she tugged on her boots and was in her car in record time.